Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
IAIN
Anyone would’ve thought that at thirty-five he’d know when to keep his mouth shut, but the ability had wandered off without giving Iain notice two nights ago. Now there was every chance that he’d have to face Maisie this morning after sticking his foot in it so ungracefully.
How would he explain what she’d overheard?
He wouldn’t want to put an idea in her head that she was undesirable – that was far from the truth. Aron was right; she was right up his street for the kind of woman he was attracted to: lively, bold, the prettiest smile. But he’d needed to get his friends off of his back, which is why he’d said what he’d said.
I am not interested in Maisie Moss.
The more Iain thought about it, the less he believed it, but he wasn’t going to go there. Maisie deserved more than he could give her, and he’d screwed up his own chances of her being interested in him that way – not that he’d assumed she would be anyway – by being an A-class prick.
He hadn’t had the chance during the quiz to clear the air, so maybe he could do it here, at this café, where the hiking group were meeting thanks to the rain pelting down in a blanket over Wales this morning.
As soon as they stepped through doors the colour of washed-up seaweed, Ted shook himself off and Iain pulled down his hood. They were late, thanks to Ted’s refusal to step outside in the rain, so he expected to see the seats of one of the larger rustic tables already filled with the hiking group.
But there was only Maisie. By herself and scrolling through her phone. Ted, the traitor, went straight for her, which didn’t give Iain a chance to prepare the right words for being face to face with her alone so soon, since he was dragged along on the end of the lead without choice. His dog stuck his nose into her lap which made Maisie squeak.
“Hello you!” Her hands dove for Ted’s neck and scratched behind his ears while he lapped up the attention.
It was just Iain in the metaphorical doghouse, then. He cleared his throat, and Maisie took another minute to fuss over his dog before easing her gaze up like she knew she was owed an apology.
“Hi.”
“Hello.” Her greeting was bland. It didn’t match the vibrancy in the curls arranged on top of her head with a bow on some kind of headband, or the peach colour on her lips. The pair of oversized rain clouds dangling from her ears that Iain was sure she’d made herself, on the other hand…
“Where are the others?” he asked, getting the feeling that this interaction would be like pulling teeth.
“You tell me.”
“It’s ten-fifteen.”
“I know,” Maisie said, giving Ted one final scratch before sitting back against the padded bench. “I’ve been here for half an hour.”
“Why?” Iain would’ve left already if he were her, because clearly no one else was coming.
“I like being punctual.”
Brimming with doubt, he pulled his phone from his pocket to check the group chat he’d seen Maisie had been added to last week.
“This is where Nain said to meet.” According to the group chat, Maisie was right about that. Only messages of thumbs-up emojis and a few short acknowledgements had come through after the arrangement was made. “And you’re fifteen minutes late,” she said pointedly.
“Take it up with Ted,” Iain grumbled and slid his phone back into his jeans pocket. The café’s cosy playlist taunted the tone of their conversation with cheery notes. “We should move.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re two people at a twelve-person table. Are you alright?” Iain got that in quickly. Apart from the scowl that Maisie directed at him – which did little to scare him off when he’d grown up the way he had – she looked generally uncomfortable.
“Peachy.” Maisie grabbed her purse and rose slowly from the bench. “I could get us some muffins? But if you’re not interested then I’ll just get another coffee.”
Any doubt Iain might’ve had that she’d heard the words that came out of his idiot mouth in the pub was obliterated.
“Maisie, sit down.” She gawped at his firmness, but it was obvious that they were doing this now before either of them said something stupid. Iain gestured at a more appropriately unoccupied two-person table in the back corner where fewer people could hear how he’d royally mucked up, softening his tone by force. “Please?”
Their gazes held, his remorse to her bitter. This wasn’t the Maisie he was starting to know. This was a Maisie who’d been hit on a nerve, not her bubbly self.
Extroverted people sucked the energy right out of him most of the time. It’s why he liked the elders of the hiking group – they were both energetic and sedate at the same rate, cheery for the sake of being cheery without any form of agenda. Yet from what he’d seen, Maisie wasn’t all as loud as first glance might seem.
At the corner table, she sat, choosing the wooden chair that looked as though it’d been here for twenty years as opposed to the newer one with armrests. Her long blue skirt hitched to her calves as she crossed her legs. Was there anything she owned that didn’t have polka dots?
Iain took the chair opposite while Ted curled up under the table, still grumpy about the rain.
“You’re mad with me,” he said when he was settled and coat removed.
“I’m not mad.” Yet her eyes and folded arms told a different story.
Even if she wasn’t, Maisie deserved an explanation, and Iain wasn’t above giving one. Beating around the bush and pretending as though he didn’t know what he’d done to make her look at him this way wouldn’t be right. He’d learned his lesson on that already.
“I’m sorry for what I said at the pub. If you’d have heard the whole conversation, then you might understand why I said it.”
“Well I didn’t,” she said. “So …”
Time to clear the air.
Iain hated doing this, breaking apart the walls he’d built around himself before anyone else could take a sledgehammer to them. “Aron saw me helping you on Sunday and started jumping to conclusions that I have feelings for you.” Maisie’s blank expression didn’t falter. “I’m not looking to date anyone. What I said wasn’t just about you.”
“Well what I heard was very clear. You couldn’t have been any more direct.”
“Maisie—”
“I’m not here to date, either,” she cut in. “I wasn’t expecting anything from you just because we’ve been made to spend some time together, which it looks like we have been again.”
Maisie waved her hand at the space between them, and Iain swallowed down a sigh. He couldn’t deny being relieved that they were on the same page about single life. She wasn’t looking for a date and neither was he. That was simple enough to understand. So why did a kernel of protest break free from that recess in his chest where he’d tucked away his shrivelled-up heart?
“Taking care of my nain is the only reason I’m here,” Maisie continued. “But I would like to make at least one friend who isn’t seventy-plus.”
Iain didn’t let it show on his face, but that surprised him. He’d half expected her to rip him a new one for what he’d said. He’d been in her position a few times over, so he knew the struggle of finding people to call friends in a new town. If the only other people who she knew here were those in the hiking group, then he didn’t blame her for seeking a friend from her own generation, so he said, “Friendship, I can do.”
“Well don’t sound so enthusiastic.” A smile cracked on Maisie’s full lips that shook Iain as though he’d taken his first breath.
Shit , maybe he was wrong. Maybe he should back away before his resolve to not get involved with a woman wore down.
Friendship. Friendship. Friendship.
“It’s just my sunshine personality,” he rebuffed in the drollest tone.
“Hm, it’s radiant today.”
Iain grunted, again. He didn’t expect Maisie to move on so easily – she’d truly looked hurt by his thoughtlessness the other night.
“Out of curiosity, why don’t you want to date?” she asked, following the path of a server bringing hot drinks and muffins to a table nearby. She’d said that she wasn’t looking for a relationship, so Iain didn’t believe her curiosity was for her own interest.
His grip on Ted’s lead in his lap tightened with his answer. “I don’t exactly have much to bring to a relationship. I’m not worthy of one.”
Maisie’s focus whipped back to him. “Why do you think that?”
A numb lump pushed against his sternum. He wasn’t going there. He’d already hit an award-winning low in record-breaking time with this woman, and Iain would rather stay there than keep on shovelling deeper.
“Do you want that coffee?” He started to stand.
“I can get?—”
“Sit.”
Her arse landed back on the seat with a wide expression that, if he wasn’t mistaken, was a little excited. “I’m not your dog.”
“No … Ted does what he’s told.”
Maisie’s jaw dropped, and he handed her Ted’s lead.
“Is he always like this?” she asked the mutt who shuffled closer to rub his head against her calf, and Iain found himself smiling as he wandered to the service counter.
A couple of guys from his rugby club and their wives were at a table by the window who nodded to him, so he nodded in return whilst he waited. Eventually he set down Maisie’s coffee – some kind of caramel concoction like the one she’d made for herself when he’d helped her move house – alongside his flat white. He brought the blueberry muffin she’d eyed minutes ago too as an add-on to his apology.
His arse that was sore from training the night before barely landed in the seat when she half-heartedly asked, “Were you this grumpy as a child?”
His lowering stuttered.
Of course he was, for reasons that’d become clearer and clearer to Iain with time. Sitting, he grunted around his bite into a sugar-dusted Welsh cake, one of the sultanas falling back to his plate.
No matter how many times Maisie called him grumpy, Iain wasn’t offended. He was well aware of how he seemed to the world. He hadn’t always been like this, but the minute things had begun to go right in his life and sunshine peered through the clouds, a thunderstorm came and drowned out all of his happiness. He had less to lose if there was nothing to wash away in the floods.
It was easier to get people to leave him alone that way. Except for this one redhead that he couldn’t find the strength within him to shake. Maisie needed someone, and he needed … life .
She ran her finger over the edge of her mug but didn’t drink from it yet, her eyes that looked more brown than green today assessing him. “Let me guess, your entire wardrobe is some shade of the earth?”
“Yep.”
“I already know your idea of fun is walking with OAPs and having gentle contact with men.”
What was she trying to get at? “It’s the best.”
“Would a makeover cheer you up?” Maisie bit into her muffin without inhibition.
“No.”
“Then maybe you do need to get laid.”
Iain choked on his coffee. His eyes burned into her like he contemplated murder. Ted, unbothered, didn’t even lift an ear.
“You have foam in your beard,” Maisie commented, tongue licking the buttercream from her mouth.
“Hm. I wonder why.” Iain wiped at the coarse hairs with the back of his hand. Being all dainty with a paper napkin wasn’t his style.
“You didn’t object,” Maisie pointed out before blowing steam from her ‘coffee’. The thing was a monstrosity of sugar and milk.
“I don’t need …” His gaze bounced down to the rosebud pout of her lips as her breath blew the sweet caramel scent his way.
Ohhh damn.
“Anything,” he finished through his teeth.
“Okay.” Her brows jumped, and her tone didn’t say that she believed him.
He didn’t need sex. It’d be nice, of course, if there were no strings involved and the chances of him seeing the woman again were slim, which was hard to achieve in a town that was only a mile wide. He’d lasted fourteen months with just his hand for company, another few were moot at this point.
Whatever new footing they were on, it was better than when Maisie had been mad at him.
He turned the tables. “Anyway, you’re the one who broke up with their boyfriend—what is it?— eight months ago now?”
“Yes,” she said with a bit of a growl.
“You seem … frustrated.”
Maisie huffed and re-crossed her legs. “If you’d been with someone for six months who only ever did half a job, you’d be frustrated too.”
The insight was awakening, but still Iain was forced to remind himself that he wasn’t in a place to get anywhere near to helping her solve that issue.
“Then maybe you’re the one who needs to?—”
“I’m good,” she said sharply, her freckled cheeks turning a touch pink.
If Iain wasn’t so sure he would screw up any attempt at a relationship again, then he would’ve swung the conversation in a different direction than he did. “Has anyone from the group texted?” He’d felt his phone vibrate but he wasn’t in the habit of checking it when he was with company.
Maisie took hers out of her purse in her lap and thumbed at the screen. “Why those …” Her lips twisted like she wanted to finish that sentence with something that wasn’t so pleasant. Iain’s mouth twitched in a smile she didn’t see as the shifting colours of the screen illuminated her face. “They’re all together and wondering where we are. Look?—”
Maisie turned her phone around and sure enough, there was a haphazardly taken selfie with thirteen faces softened by time, the pad of a finger obstructing one corner of the screen.
Her brows puckered together cutely. “Did we get a different message or something?”
“I only got the one in that group chat.”
“Me too.”
Iain glanced sideways at the rain pounding the street outside. He knew from the photo where everybody else had gathered, and that bistro was a few streets over across the other side of town – impossible to have mixed up with the one they currently sat in.
“Do you want to join them?” he asked. It’d be a quick ten-minute walk in the rain, but Maisie would have to pass her flat just to turn back afterwards.
She hesitated. “I kind of have a lot of work to do today. I have orders for my business that I need to package and take to be shipped.” She sounded guilty, as if having stuff to do outside of seeing the hiking group was a bad thing. Iain didn’t suppose for one minute that Ms Vera was giving her much breathing space either, given her persistence in having Maisie join her outings.
“I know Nain is trying to be helpful and get me to meet people, but I don’t think she quite understands that I don’t have as much time as she thinks that I do.” Maisie carried on, and Iain sat, watching her, listening, as she played with the paper case of her blueberry muffin. “I didn’t want to move here but I don’t have a choice.”
Iain knew what it was like to be caught in a familial situation that you couldn’t get out of. Whether she’d been listening or not, he’d revealed that detail in her living room. He might’ve been too pushy in telling her that she did in fact have a choice to leave. Fancied a change in scenery is what she’d told him the morning they’d met. Small town, coastal life wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and by the look on her face, she already regretted it.
“Vera is keeping something from us, our family,” Maisie finally said, worrying her lip with her teeth. “That’s the real reason I’m here.”
He’d watched her fiddling with the muffin case, but his focus snapped to her downturned eyes. “Something? Like what?”
“We’re not sure. Her breaking her wrist like she did hasn’t ever happened before – she’s never injured. And she’s been dodging questions on the phone since before Christmas. The other week, there was a box of stuff in her kitchen she said she was going to get rid of and she wouldn’t say why. It’s just not like her to hide something.”
Worry spiralled into Iain’s veins. He’d never had grandparents that he’d known very well. He didn’t know that kind of anxiousness when they became old and frail. But he knew these elders of the hiking group that’d adopted him like a lost, wayfaring child. When he’d been sick last year, he’d been helped without question and taken under each of their wings.
He’d never said out loud how much he cared for them all, though perhaps he should. He came running whenever each of them called – hell, he’d been the one who’d picked Vera up and driven her to hospital the other month when Ronnie had been in hysterics over her accident. He didn’t think that Maisie knew that.
He set his elbows forward on the table and lowered his voice. “You think she’s sick.”
Shoulders slumping, Maisie sighed. “I don’t know. Like this meeting today, she got the café wrong. Ronnie hovers around her. And she was really eager to have me out of her house … It’s just so out of character that something must be wrong.”
“I’m sure she’s fine,” Iain said, calming the train of his thoughts. Maisie wouldn’t need him suggesting things that’d make her more anxious. “There’ll be some other reason.”
“I hope you’re right.” Muffin case folded into a neat triangle, Maisie scrubbed her hands down her face, drawing Iain’s gaze along her pink cheeks, crossing a constellation of light-brown freckles. “I’m sorry, I just dumped a lot on you.”
It appeared like she didn’t have many others to lift those burdens from her shoulders. Maybe he was the only one in this town who she could bring into her confidence.
“Don’t apologise. It’s me who’s still in the doghouse.”
“I’ve already forgiven you for that. But I’d like to know why you said I should stay away from you.”
His eyes lowered. “You heard that too …”
“You weren’t exactly quiet , Iain,” Maisie pointed out with the ghost of a happier smile, “and I was five feet away.”
He sat back and popped the crick in his neck, glancing at Ted where he snored at Maisie’s feet. “The truth?”
“It’s always better than a lie.” She didn’t sound as sarcastic as the words that came out.
Iain held off for a moment, wondering if she’d back down if his gaze burned into hers for long enough. But Maisie, this odd, beautiful woman, gave as good as she got and didn’t shy away.
You really want to know, he thought as he sighed. “My life is a mess.” To answer her original question. “I can’t entertain committing to someone until I’ve fixed my problems.”
Maisie let her eyes wander his shoulders and chest. “You don’t look all too messy to me.”
If she hadn’t already told him her only wish was for friendship, then he’d think that she was flirting with him. He rather liked her attention that way.
Friendship. Friendship. Friendship.
“I am,” Iain concluded. “And that’s all I want to say about it.”
Maisie’s tongue traced over her lips before she rolled them inward, breaking her attention from him to the artwork on the panelled wall beside their table. The painting was a dull wash of colours, but she looked at it as if it were a double rainbow over a wildflower meadow in May. “I miss the sun.”
“You’re in the wrong country,” he said.
“That’s not true. My summers here used to be beautiful.” Maisie stared up at the artwork. “I won’t be staying long enough to see it though, hopefully.”
For some strange reason, Iain wished that she might. The probation lease on her new flat was three months, which would bring her right up to the start of May. It wouldn’t be summer, but the weather would definitely be nicer than the grey clouds that rolled in beyond the window.
Gently, Maisie touched the raised paint on the canvas which looked like stones. “Did you know that when male penguins fall in love, they search for the perfect pebble and give it to the female?”
Iain watched her, unable to look anywhere else. “I didn’t.”
“They’d have a field day with all of the pebble beaches around here.”
“Well we don’t have penguins, but come on another hike and maybe you could see a bottlenose or two.”
“Dolphins?” Excitement lightened Maisie’s voice.
“Mm-hmm.”
“I’d love that.”
Iain didn’t know how long they sat, their mugs slowly emptying.
“I think I’m just going to head home,” Maisie said when she began to gather her purse. “I shouldn’t have dragged myself out today, but Nain insisted.”
“You alright?” She’d had her arms folded down in her lap like she was hugging herself for the last ten minutes.
“Nothing for you to bother yourself with.”
“I’ll decide what I’m bothered with,” he answered.
A small blush rose in Maisie’s cheeks. She stood slowly, like her joints still ached from the hike. It’d been two weeks so that wasn’t likely.
Dodging his concern, she smiled politely down at him. “Thank you for the coffee. And the muffin.”
“You’re welcome.”
He watched her leave, the slower motion of her gait as she wrapped herself in her long coat, and wondered just what it was that she was hiding, too.